Friday, November 13, 2015

At last night's WWCode Cincinnati panel, I recommended that developers talk to their DBA about what advanced capabilities their RDBMS can offer, so that they don't end up reimplementing functionality in the app that are already available (better and more efficiently) in the database itself. Devs can waste a lot of effort by thinking of databases as dumb, inert data boxes.

I was asked an excellent question: "Where can a dev quickly familiarize herself with what those capabilities are?" My answer was, "Um."

Do not say they should read the docs. That is a "let them eat cake" answer. The PostgreSQL docs are over 2900 pages. That's not what they need.

Suggestions, folks? Python developers have built great summary sites, like the Hitchhiker's Guide to Python. What are the equivalents in the database world? Do they exist? Do we need to write them?